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by mnd999 1726 days ago
Enforcement is pretty lax though, plenty of folks in the suburbs burning coal and logs on their ‘trendy’ open fires.
1 comments

The particulate output of these pales in comparison to the coal plants though. Reminds me of when China clamped down on street vendors who used open fires while ignoring the steel plants down the road.
Tonnes of release doesnt tell the whole story though. Domestic burners are closer to the ground and other humans. Coal power stations have stacks to shoot the emissions higher in the atmosphere.

In developed countries it just seems like a backward step when people can afford something better than fashion driven legacy technology.

Exactly, and even in china I imagine the coal plants have at least a basic filtration system, not to mention European coal plants. Which of course no home fireplace has.
It really depends. I am not located in China, but our problems are pretty similar in nature. We have a lot of smaller, I am not sure what they're called, boiler houses? One to two-storey pipes with zero emission control, piping out black smoke 24/7 for most of the year.
Coal plants in Europe are much cleaner than they used to be (still we should work on shutting them down).

Nowadays emissions from traffic, industry in general and heating all are in the same order of magnitude: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/air-quality-atlas-europe-ma...